ISO 639 macrolanguage
A macrolanguage is a group of mutually intelligible speech varieties, or dialect continuum, that have no traditional name in common, and which may be considered distinct languages by their speakers.Macrolanguages are used as a book-keeping mechanism for the ISO 639 international standard of language codes.Macrolanguages are established to assist mapping between different sets of ISO language codes.Specifically, there may be a many-to-one correspondence between ISO 639-3, intended to identify all the thousands of languages of the world, and either of two other sets, ISO 639-1, established to identify languages in computer systems, and ISO 639-2, which encodes a few hundred languages for library cataloguing and bibliographic purposes.For purposes of [ISO 639-3], they are considered to be macrolanguage code elements.ISO 639-3 is curated by SIL International; ISO 639-2 is curated by the Library of Congress (USA).[dubious – discuss] However, this is not its primary function and the classification is not evenly applied.For example, Chinese is a macrolanguage encompassing many languages that are not mutually intelligible, but the languages "Standard German", "Bavarian German", and other closely related languages do not form a macrolanguage, despite being more mutually intelligible.Other examples include Tajiki not being part of the Persian macrolanguage despite sharing much lexicon, and Urdu and Hindi not forming a macrolanguage despite forming a mutually intelligible dialect continuum.Basically, ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 use different criteria for dividing language varieties into languages, 639-2 uses shared writing systems and literature more whereas 639-3 focuses on mutual intelligibility and shared lexicon.The use of macrolanguages was applied in Ethnologue, starting in the 16th edition.[3] The most recent registered macrolanguage is Sanskrit with code san, adopted in 15 December 2023, though it already existed as individual language for several years.[5] Some of the macrolanguages had no individual language (as defined by 639-3) in ISO 639-2, e.g. "ara" (Arabic), but ISO 639-3 recognizes different varieties of Arabic as separate languages under some circumstances.Others, like "nor" (Norwegian) had their two individual parts (nno Nynorsk, nob Bokmål) already in 639-2.This is an attempt to deal with varieties that may be linguistically distinct from each other, but are treated by their speakers as forms of the same language, e.g. in cases of diglossia.For example, ISO 639-2 also includes codes for collections of languages; these are not the same as macrolanguages.[9] aka is the ISO 639-3 language code for Akan.There are two individual language codes assigned: ful is the ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-3 language code for Fulah (also spelled Fula).There are nine individual language codes assigned for varieties of Fulah: gba is the ISO 639-3 language code for Gbaya located in the Central African Republic.They are not listed under Chinese in ISO 639-3 because they are categorized as ancient and historical languages, respectively.